Loading...
Flagship engagement model
We manage the depth. You command the surface.
Most IT partnerships deliver tickets and reports. We deliver a governed roadmap, embedded strategic leadership, and the service performance to earn the right. For ambitious, scaling organisations.
Strategy is already in. 24/7/365 in-house support, embedded strategic leadership through StrategyOS, and live visibility through CMS Strata — delivered as one governed partnership, not a commodity helpdesk.
The proof scoreboard
18 seconds
Avg answer time
87%
First-contact resolution
99.94%
SLA attainment
97.8%
Average CSAT
98%
Client retention
24/7/365
In-house support
Published service performance across our managed base. ISO 27001 certified · Cyber Essentials Plus · Microsoft Solutions Partner · Part of Lyra Technology Group.
The model behind multi-decade partnerships — Village Hotels since 1995
This is a decision about your operating model, not about buying support hours.
Most providers sell hours and tickets. We sell a governed roadmap, embedded strategic leadership, and the proven service performance that earns the right to lead. Most managed service providers operate above the waterline. We work above and below it — and most of the value sits below.
Above the waterline · traditional MSP
- Helpdesk and incident response
- Basic environment management
- Change control and patching
- Monthly reports
- Reactive break/fix
Below the waterline · CMS Group
- Roadmap ownership and technology vision
- Programme governance and vendor orchestration
- Spend governance and licence rationalisation
- Live visibility and board-grade reporting
- Business process and line-of-business systems design
Three commitments we make
Every CMS partnership rests on the same three commitments: lead the strategy, show you everything, and deliver consistently.
We lead
Strategic governance
We act as your Lead IT Authority, not a ticket queue. An embedded vCIO and our StrategyOS framework are included as standard, owning roadmap, budget shaping, vendor ecosystem and compliance posture alongside your leadership team.
- Embedded virtual CIO inside the relationship
- Co-developed 12–24 month costed roadmap
- Vendor and renewal management end to end
You see everything
Radical transparency
We eliminate the black box. Through CMS Strata you get a real-time cockpit view of your entire estate — the same live data our engineers see. No quarterly PDFs, no request-and-wait.
- Live ticket, project and asset performance
- Continuous security and compliance posture
- Board-ready reporting on demand
We deliver
Operational speed
You get a named, high-performance pod — not an anonymous call centre. Direct-to-engineer access, UK-based, in-house, with the service performance to earn the right to lead.
- 18-second average answer time
- 87% resolved at first contact
- Named engineers who know your environment
One pod. One platform. One commercial structure.
Everything, included as standard
No silos, no hand-offs, and no third-party for the part where the user feels it most. The partnership combines support, strategy and transparency under one operating model.
Embedded vCIO & StrategyOS
Strategic leadership built into the contract, not sold as a workshop or an hourly add-on.
24/7/365 in-house support
A named pod of UK-based engineers. No offshoring of the relationship-critical layer.
CMS Strata platform
Your live client cockpit for service, strategy, assets, risk and contracts. Included as standard.
Proactive technical services
24/7 monitoring, automated cross-platform patching, and twice-daily change control.
User lifecycle management
Joiners, movers and leavers run as an audited workflow, not an ad-hoc ticket bounce.
Compliance & governance
Continuous alignment to Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, GDPR and PCI-DSS, surfaced live.
The shift you are buying
What changes when CMS is your partner
The decision is not about buying support hours. It is about moving from reactive effort to a technology function run with strategic intent.
Today
Tickets logged and chased
Issues resolved at first contact by a named pod
IT seen as an unaccountable cost centre
A governed roadmap tied to business outcomes
Quarterly PDFs and black-box reporting
Live visibility in CMS Strata, the moment it happens
Reactive break/fix
Proactive, monitored and continuously strengthened
Strategy sold as an annual workshop
Embedded vCIO leadership, included as standard
Supplier sprawl you manage yourself
One accountable partner managing the ecosystem
StrategyOS
Strategy is already in
StrategyOS is how we run the strategic side of every engagement — a named strategic lead and a structured cadence of audit, roadmap and review. The roadmap is the output, not the input: we do not arrive with a finished plan before we have run discovery.
Explore the full methodology01
Foundation & discovery
A 360-degree audit of your estate plus structured stakeholder interviews across Finance, Operations, Compliance and IT. The output is a current-state baseline and a prioritised risk register.
02
Roadmap development
A co-developed 12–24 month roadmap, sequenced and costed, with every initiative tied to a commercial outcome. It lives in Strata, reviewed quarterly and refreshed annually.
03
Departmental engagement
Workshops with departmental heads to map processes, surface automation candidates and identify governed AI opportunities — grounding strategy in operational reality.
04
Ongoing leadership
Quarterly business reviews, monthly check-ins, renewal management and continuous compliance monitoring. Strategy stays current, not filed and forgotten.
The 5-Star Support Ecosystem
Support the surface you command
One delivery framework with three operational pillars and a single accountability model — all delivered in-house, all surfaced in Strata.
Service Desk
Fast, human, accountable. A UK in-house pod that knows your people, systems and suppliers.
- Direct-to-engineer access — no call-logger layer
- SLA-based triage by business impact
- Senior engineer leads priority and escalation
- Third-party vendor coordination owned by us
User Administration
The user lifecycle delivered as a secure, auditable discipline with a clear approval trail.
- Zero-touch onboarding via Autopilot
- Least-privilege role and access management
- Structured offboarding and licence reclaim
- Asset and licence register in Strata
Proactive Technical Services
Continuously strengthening the environment, not just maintaining it. Backed by our NOC/SOC.
- 24/7 monitoring across endpoints, servers, network and cloud
- Automated patching for 1,000+ applications
- Daily backup integrity checks
- Change Advisory Board running twice daily
CMS Strata
You see what we see
Strata is our proprietary, in-house client cockpit. It pulls live, API-connected data from your environment and surfaces it through one branded portal — so your leadership team sees the same real-time data our engineers do. No black box.
See inside the platformAegis
Live service desk view: ticket volumes, SLA performance and trends.
Ascent
Project and roadmap tracking with board-ready milestones and owners.
Polaris
Your evolving StrategyOS roadmap and strategic direction.
Aurora
Live, searchable, governed knowledge base for process and configuration.
Maturity engine
NIST and CIS aligned scoring across security, resilience and lifecycle.
Contracts & vendors
Renewal calendar, notice periods and AI-parsed supplier governance.
Strategy is already in.
See what a governed partnership looks like for your organisation — no obligation.
Mobilisation & the first 90 days
A governed transition, not a black hole
Documentation and a clean, client-owned record of your estate are the first deliverables. You end mobilisation with a fuller, better-owned picture of your technology than you started with.
1
Weeks 1–2
Mobilise & discover
Named pod stood up, DPA executed, stakeholder workshops, and a 360-degree audit of the live estate. Strata onboarding and supplier register loading begin.
2
Weeks 3–4
Validate & prepare
Tooling integration, RMM agents deployed, knowledge transfer and a clean, client-owned record of the estate rebuilt. Draft roadmap reviewed with you before go-live.
3
Go-live + hypercare
Stabilise
Service transfers with a higher-frequency cadence for the first month. Daily stand-ups, direct-to-engineer hotline live, and early issues absorbed by named CMS resource.
4
First 90 days
Lead
A costed, board-ready roadmap signed off, a prioritised risk register, and the monthly governance rhythm established. Strategy begins to compound.
Outcomes, not activity
We compete on outcomes, trust and strategic relevance — evidenced by results across comparable partnerships.
37%
IT spend reduction
A 200-employee professional services firm — around £1M saved over five years.
£400k
Annual operational saving
A healthcare provider's intake process cut from five weeks to seven minutes.
44%
Of actions completed day one
Up from 20% over 28 days previously — strategy that actually moves.
Service levels
SLAs that bite, tracked in real time
Priority is assessed by business impact and urgency — not an arbitrary timer — and tracked live in Strata with full month-end reconciliation. Indicative targets:
| Priority | Definition | Response | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 — Critical | Full service down or VIP/business-critical failure | 15 min | 4 working hours |
| P2 — High | Major function impaired, multiple users affected | 30 min | 8 working hours |
| P3 — Medium | Single user impacted, workaround available | 1 working hour | 2 working days |
| P4 — Low | Cosmetic or minor issue | 2 working hours | 5 working days |
| P5 — Request | Provisioning, account or change request | 4 working hours | Per change calendar |
Who the partnership is for
CMS exists for organisations that need more than a support provider but still want the certainty of one.
Ambitious, scaling organisations
Leadership teams who treat technology as the operating model, not a back-office cost centre.
Multi-site & complex estates
Hospitality, professional services, healthcare and property where uptime and judgement matter at once.
Director-led, white-glove environments
Senior user bases where high-value meetings and a named, visible engineer are mission-critical.
Regulated & governance-driven
Organisations that need defensible compliance posture and board-grade reporting as standard.
Prefer a different model?
Not a better MSP. A different category.
The simplest way to understand the partnership is by what it refuses to be.
A commodity MSP with better reporting.
A Technology Management Consultancy with governance, roadmap ownership, and Strata visibility as standard.
A sales-led reseller operation.
A client-side advocate. We are paid to represent your interests, not a vendor's channel margin.
A consultancy that leaves static PDFs behind.
Embedded strategic leadership inside a live operating model. StrategyOS runs continuously, not annually.
A pure software company pretending services do not matter.
A delivery-grounded partner. CMS Strata is the proof layer, not the product. Real people sit behind every metric.
A hospitality-only player.
Forged in hospitality. Proven across manufacturing, healthcare, architects, and professional services where complexity is high.
Common questions
Is strategy really included, or is it an add-on?
It is genuinely included. StrategyOS and an embedded vCIO are part of the per-user managed service fee. We do not sell strategy by the hour or as an annual workshop — it is the foundation of the relationship, not a premium line item.
How is this different from a traditional MSP?
A traditional MSP operates above the waterline: helpdesk, incident response, basic environment management. We work above and below the waterline. Strategic leadership, programme governance, vendor orchestration and business process design sit inside every engagement as standard.
What size of organisation is this for?
The model suits ambitious organisations from roughly 50 users upwards, particularly multi-site, director-led or regulated environments. If you prefer to keep an internal IT team, our Co-Managed IT model applies the same governance alongside your people.
How does pricing work?
Pricing is a transparent, predictable per-user (or per-staff) monthly charge, typically on a 36-month term with annual RPI indexation only. Strategy, Strata and proactive technical services are inclusive. Onboarding is a one-time, collaboratively scoped charge. There are no surprise invoices — out-of-scope consumption is visible in Strata.
What does onboarding and transition look like?
A governed, milestone-driven mobilisation. Documentation and a clean, client-owned record of your estate are the first deliverables, not an afterthought. Where an incumbent cannot transfer knowledge cleanly, our discovery-led approach reconstructs it independently, removing the single biggest transition risk.
Do you offshore support?
No. Core support is delivered in-house by named, UK-based engineers. We do not offshore the relationship-critical layer.
“For any operators looking for an IT support and solutions provider that will actually become part of your extended team, and not just another faceless contact for your staff, CMS should be the first call you make. Top of the list.”
Ready to run technology with intent?
Score your IT maturity in two minutes, then discuss the results with a specialist — and see where strategy is already in, and where it is not yet.
We take on 8 new strategy clients per quarter.
100+ organisations on the model. Multi-decade partnerships, not transactional contracts.
2-minute assessmentInstant resultsIndustry benchmarksNo commitment
100+
Organisations Trust Us
35+
Years Experience
98%
Client Retention
18 seconds
Avg Answer Time